Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Five: Naomi

For all Naomi’s life, the problem had been knowing which information to believe. A few billion people with access to networks and as many newsfeeds as there were transmitters made it easy to find someone loudly declaiming every possible opinion in every corner and niche of the solar system. And once the repeaters were up, information came to and from the distant worlds beyond the gates with a light delay of only hours. To understand her new reality, she had to find models in ancient history, when the living voice or marks on physical media were the only means of storing and moving information. Ancient North America had used something called the pony express. A series of carts and animals that hauled written information across the then-vast deserts. Or that was how she understood the process, never having seen a pony or a handwritten letter on paper. Now the ponies were ships and torpedoes, the letters were compressed data bursts, and the deserts were the hard vacuum of space and the emptiness of the gate hub at its center. The effect, though, was that news of the far worlds came unreliably. The events on Auberon and in Auberon system took on an exaggerated importance because she knew about them immediately. Anything going on in Bara Gaon or Laconia or Sol, Freehold or New Cyprus or Gethen, became foreign and exotic by being rare. The discovery that “two gates lost” meant that the Thanjavur and Tecoma gates had been destroyed and the systems behind them stranded only added to the sense of vast things happening, far away. The universe had expanded again, and all the things that had been close were once again much more distant. The reports that did come through were precious as air on a leaky ship.

And so, when word came from Sol that the Tempest was dead, it felt like a revelation.

It didn’t come from underground sources. Bobbie hadn’t sent a report, or if she had, the bottle had been lost in transit or slowed to the point that the civilian news outpaced it. The first Naomi heard of it was on Laconian state feeds run by the governor. The tone of the report was outraged and meant to inspire fear. Terrorists had murdered a Laconian diplomat and stolen military technology which they’d then used to slaughter the protector of Sol system. The danger of chaos and riot in Sol system were, to listen to the feed, apocalyptic. Laconian forces were gearing up to protect innocent civilians from the waves of reprisals and violence that were sure to follow.

Probably it had sounded persuasive to Laconian ears. The bone-deep assumption that all things Laconian were good and all opposition evil made for a hell of a blind spot when it came to writing propaganda. For Naomi and Chava it was the resolution of an uncertainty they’d been carrying. They knew now how Bobbie’s plan had worked out. For all the others in between—the normal citizens of Auberon—the message was that the unstoppable Laconian machine could, in fact, be stopped. Had been stopped. The certainty that had come with imperial rule had a crack in it wide enough to drive a ship through. And like all good news, it brought a list of new problems with it. Good problems, the problems Bobbie and Naomi had been hoping for, but problems all the same.

“Five years of shipping records deleted,” Chava said. “Wiped out.”

“And it wasn’t us?”

“It wasn’t anyone I’m aware of,” she said, pouring out a cup of coffee. “You know the network better than I do, but …”

“It just means that they’ll load it from backups,” Naomi said, taking the cup. She’d gotten used to Chava’s French press coffee. It was strong and bitter and occasionally carried a bit of the coffee grounds in it. She found she was starting to prefer it to the normal ship-dispensed kind. “So it sounds like someone managed to get access to the backup. Put in whatever they want history to have been, and now it’s the official record.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Might be one of our cells acting independently. Or civilians taking initiative. Or criminals. Hell, it could be Laconians using the opportunity to hide something they did and blame it on us. No matter who it is, though, they weren’t confident enough to risk it before, and now they are. And what’s happening here? Some variety of it is going on everyplace else too.”

Decentralized authority was what Belters had done since the start, generations ago, when the power to communicate orders outdistanced the power to enforce them. Old Rokku, back in her radical days, had talked about the inners being like a sword that hit in one place hard enough to destroy. The Belt was like water, able to push in from all places at once. The death of the Tempest hadn’t actually changed anything for the systems outside of Sol. It wasn’t like Duarte had been willing to send his planet-killer warship to follow up on suspicious data loss. What had changed was the confidence people had in the system, and that uncertainty created new holes, cracks, and opportunities.

Laconia was powerful because it had a single vision, and one brilliant mind behind it all. The underground, like the OPA before it, probably had as many visions as there were people in it, and even as the titular leader, Naomi’s was only one of many voices. Duarte’s machine was limited. With enough going on at any given time, his attention could be flooded. That was his weakness and their power.

“New contacts are coming in too,” Naomi said. “I’ve had reports on almost a dozen since the first report came in.”

“That’s a good sign. People feel the tide turning.”

“Some of them do,” Naomi agreed. “And some of them have other agendas. I’ve spent months figuring out how to get our people hired on by their managers. They’re capable of doing the same thing to us.”

“I’ll be careful,” Chava said. “Background checks, surveillance on new recruits, test assignments. The whole show. I won’t let anybody sneak in the aft airlock.”

“You will, though,” Naomi said. “Test the people you trust too. Make it random. And make it so that someone can keep eyes on you. It’s like checking the seals on your suit. Everyone checking everyone should just be normal. And be ready for the crackdown. Because it’s coming.”

Chava sipped her own coffee and nodded. “I wish you were staying. I mean, it will be nice to be able to invite my friends over to my place again, but … I’ve enjoyed having you here.”

“Even though it risked getting you killed?”

Chava was one of those people who could frown with just her forehead. “Maybe because of that. I think I’m too much of an adrenaline junkie to survive as a ship rental manager. If it wasn’t this, I’d be slingshotting on my vacations.”

Naomi finished her coffee, put down the white porcelain cup for the last time, and hugged Chava goodbye. Naomi’s belongings were in a tight-wrapped bag by the door. They fit easily under her arm. She looked around Chava’s rooms one last time. The kitchen, the common area, the passage to the bedroom that had been hers for really not so long a time. Still, long enough for everything to change at least twice.

The knot she felt in her chest wasn’t sorrow at leaving here. She liked Chava, and it was a pleasant space to be in, but it wasn’t home. What she missed was the idea of a home of her own. People she knew for more than a few weeks at a time. It was worse, because she’d had a place once. And a family with it. She would never stop missing that.

The transport tubes on Auberon’s lunar base ran cars every seven minutes, and the signs and directions were clear and well designed. It wasn’t hard getting from Chava’s place to the docks, or from the docks to the skiff taken out in a false name tied to an imaginary corporation and insured with a policy that would never be used.

Auberon was a target, and not only because it was a successful colony. Any Laconian traffic analysis of the bottles the underground used was going to show high throughput on the Auberon gate. With the Tempest dead, there would be a response, and neither she nor Chava nor any of her other high-level contacts doubted that part of that response would come to Auberon. And the best way to survive an asteroid strike was not to be on the planet.

While she waited for the traffic control queue to reach her, she opened a window and called up the visual telescopy on the planet below her. Another blue marble in the void. The wide whirl of a hurricane covered part of an ocean she’d never see. The scattering of continents across the visible hemisphere below her was like dice thrown in a backroom craps game. A vast, beautiful sphere with so few people on it. Cities with universities full of students who’d never known a different sky. She doubted she’d ever see it again, and so she watched and told herself to remember. There were so many last times that passed unrecognized. Knowing in the moment what was ending and wouldn’t come again was precious.

The connection to traffic control went live. “Skiff eighteen forty-two, your transit to Bara Gaon is approved. You are clear to exit.”

“Acknowledged, Control. Releasing the clamps now.”

The little ship, light as an empty food can, shuddered when the docking clamps let go, and Naomi opened the throttle on the drive. The image of Auberon grew a little smaller, and a little smaller, and a little smaller until she closed it down. The moment was over.

The skiff was a tiny little thing, too small and undistinguished for a name. A transponder code, a number, and a perfunctory paper trail. It was as cramped as a racing ship, but without the maneuverability or high-end crash couch. It was intended for in-system trips, usually between planets in similar orbits. Taking it into the depths of the system, through the ring, and then back down some stellar gravity well meant traveling well outside its intended use. Naomi didn’t find it intimidating. She’d gone much farther in much worse in her life. After a few days’ hard burn, she went on the float.

She spent the hours double-checking the system, such as it was. Making sure the air mix was where it should be, the reactor bottle, the water tanks. Knowing everything about her little bubble of air and life was comforting. If she caught a micrometeorite, it would be too late to learn, so she did it now. Prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised. The skiff didn’t have a gym, but she still had her resistance bands from her life in the shell game. She could adapt. She always did.

She also found herself imagining conversations with Saba and with Jim and Bobbie and Alex. There were strategic decisions she was going to have to make. Bobbie’s victory put Duarte on his back foot.

With only a single Magnetar-class ship left, there was a chance for the underground to drive Laconia into a purely defensive posture. Even restrict it to its own system. It would mean making a real and credible threat on Laconia itself, but it was possible. But it wasn’t enough.

There had been a time when the Transport Union and the governments of Mars and Earth had expected Laconia to be like any other colony world: struggling for base survival and aiming for self-sustaining agriculture sometime in a generation or so. But Duarte had taken the protomolecule with him along with the expertise to use it, and he’d found the construction platforms that could build ships like the Tempest and the Storm. And apparently a way to create and bottle antimatter. A threat wasn’t enough. She had to find a way to break that manufacturing capacity. If Laconia fell, it had to fall hard. It had to know that its dream was over, that it wasn’t exceptional. Once it was broken down to the same level as other worlds, it could be brought back. Reintegrated. Because that was the trick. That was the deep lesson of the Belters and the inner planets. The OPA and the Transport Union.

It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence. That was her strategy now. The synthesis of her arguments with Bobbie. The answer she wished they’d found together, when they were both alive.

Once she reached Bara Gaon—the other major success among the colony worlds—she’d have to get a sense of what warships she could muster and the transit times. If there was a way to lure Duarte’s forces out away from Laconia system and then push in when their home fleet was spread thin, there might be a way.

She was still thinking about that, imagining what Saba or Bobbie or Jim might think, when she started the braking burn. The bottle from Sol system passed through the Auberon gate just a few hours after that. The skiff captured the encrypted data, just the way Chava’s system would do back on the planet’s moon. It took half a day to finish unpacking, so hours passed before she heard Alex’s voice again and knew what they’d lost in order to win.

He looked … not older. He didn’t look old. Or tired. She’d seen him look tired before. He looked diminished. Like the grief had taken some of the color from his eyes.

“So it turns out I’m done here,” he said in his private message to her. “I got this young guy I been training up should be able to take over. We’re headin’ for … our little dry dock. You know the one.” Even in three layers of encryption, Alex wouldn’t say the word Freehold. “When we get there, I’m stepping out. I thought I might go check on the old girl. Make sure nothing’s been makin’ a nest in her. After that, I don’t know. I guess that’s your call, since you’re running the show now. I don’t want to take her out unless you’re good with it. You and me are the only ones left now. So. Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let Bobbie go.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” Naomi said to the screen. Her tears made lenses over her eyes. “Oh, sweet man, don’t apologize for this.”

But the message was done, and the passage through the ring gate was almost upon her. She passed into the slow zone with a heaviness that didn’t have anything to do with the rate of her change of velocity.

It was her first transit since they’d lost Medina. And Saba. And the model of human civilization that she’d understood. The station at the center of the ring was glowing bright as a little star, still shedding the energy it had absorbed from the gamma burst. The surface of the ring space, which had been a featureless blackness, danced with twisting auroras that were weirder and more threatening than the dark had been. What scared her more, though, were the ships.

She had expected the space to be empty. After everything that had happened, she’d thought traffic between the gates would be close to nothing. She’d been wrong. Her little skiff picked up transponder signals for almost two dozen ships, and drive signatures for more than that. The Laconian directive that the ring space be kept clear was being ignored on a scale she hadn’t understood, and the raw danger of it took her breath away. With no Medina Station to control the passages, the chances of going dutchman were much worse than they should have been.

She’d made her transit in distraction and ignorance, and she could have vanished and never known why. And that was assuming that the event that killed Medina and the Typhoon, that had destroyed two of the gates in the network, hadn’t changed the rules. If the threshold for vanishing was different now, they wouldn’t know. Not without testing it.

Maybe it was the need for supplies on the vulnerable colonies or the chance to deliver goods without paying the union. Maybe it was that humanity, given freedom, forgot about the prospect of consequences. Whatever the drive, it took her breath away. It was such a shock that she didn’t notice at first that two of the ships were Laconian warships like the Gathering Storm, or that they were burning toward her. In the mess of the traffic and her own internal chaos, she didn’t see that until the skiff got the connection request from the Monsoon.

Her system had the software to disguise her voice and appearance, and she checked five different times that it was running before she accepted the request.

“This is Chief Petty Officer Norman of the Monsoon,” the man on the screen said. “You are in violation of quarantine. Please leave the ring space immediately.” His voice had the irritated singsong of someone reciting a hated ritual.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s just that my brother’s sick. I was supposed to be back to him weeks ago. I don’t have any contraband, I swear.”

“I don’t care where you go,” the Laconian said. “Just get out of here and stay out. There will a permanent force in here soon, and this kind of thing will get people shot. Be somewhere else when that happens.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll transit out right away, sir.”

The connection dropped. They were swamped. More than that, they had ships in the slow zone that weren’t stopping to control the space. That meant they either understood the risks and were keeping their exposure to a repeat of the catastrophe that had killed Medina Station and the Typhoon to a minimum or they had bigger fish to fry or both. And, she saw as she tracked their courses, the Laconian destroyers were heading for Auberon.

“You came close,” she said softly, “but no cigar.”

The Bara Gaon gate was on a secant that cut her passage through the ring gate to almost half what the maximum distance would have been. The gate wasn’t quite where the navigation system expected it to be. The loss of the Thanjavur and Tecoma gates had shifted all the others just the smallest bit, but enough to make the software care about it. She went to correct the course manually … and paused.

My brother’s sick, she thought. And so am I.

She corrected the skiff’s course, aiming it for Freehold. And for home.